Review: NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 in SLI - can it beat AMD?

Two is better than one

NVIDIA unveiled its newest mainstream graphics card earlier in the
week. The
GeForce GTS 450 1,024MB uses the modular Fermi architecture in a
sensible fashion to create a GPU that marries performance, features and
price in a reasonable-enough package. Our thoughts concluded that GTS
450
would succeed if priced below £100.

Modern GPUs' modular design means that two-way multi-GPU scaling -
adding a
second card into the system - approaches 100 per cent in new games, and
the combining of two mainstream GPUs always offers readers some food
for thought, to see how they compare to genuine high-end GPUs. To this
end, NVIDIA dropped off a couple of reference-clocked GTS 450 cards and
told us to get on with it.

Please head on over to the original
review to get a better
understanding of how the GeForce GTS 450 works.
Stay on this page if
you want to see benchmark results.

The multi-GPU SLI recipe is quite simple. Grab two cards, install them
into an SLI-compatible motherboard with two x16 mechanical slots, lash
them together with a cable, and install the driver. We used an ASUS
P7P55D Premium motherboard and Intel Core i5 750 CPU as the supporting
platform.

The motherboard provides PCIe gen 2 x8 bandwidth on each x16 slot. Now
let's get on to some benchmarks.